The answer to the problem of suffering is not away from the problem but in it. The inevitability of pain will not be met by deadening sensitivity but… - Alan Watts

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The answer to the problem of suffering is not away from the problem but in it. The inevitability of pain will not be met by deadening sensitivity but by increasing it, by exploring and feeling out the manner in which the natural organism itself wants to react and which its innate wisdom has provided.

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About Alan Watts

Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was an English philosopher, writer, speaker, and expert in comparative religion.

Biography information from Wikiquote · Portrait adapted from Wikimedia Commons, The University of Vermont Alumni Magazine vol. 39 no. 01, p. 22. (Public domain / CC0)

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Alan Wilson Watts Alan W. Watts

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Additional quotes by Alan Watts

[T]he possession of a body is not a relationship to a person; one is related to the person only in being related to the organism of another in its total functioning. For the human being is not a thing but a process, not an object but a life.

The principle thing is to understand that there is no safety or security. One of the worst vicious circles is the problem of the alcoholic. In very many cases he knows quite clearly that he is destroying himself, that, for him, liquor is poison, that he actually hates being drunk, and even dislikes the taste of liquor. And yet he drinks. For, dislike it as he may, the experience of not drinking is worse.

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As a matter of fact, our age is no more insecure than any other. Poverty, disease, war, change, and death are nothing new. In the best of times “security” has never been more than temporary and apparent. But it has been possible to make the insecurity of human life supportable by belief in unchanging things beyond the reach of calamity — in God, in man’s immortal soul, and in the government of the universe by eternal laws of right.

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